Speaking with Wired editor David Rowan at an event launching the magazine's March issue, Tim Berners-Lee said that although part of this is about keeping an eye on for-profit internet monopolies such as search engines and social networks, the greatest danger is the emergence of a balkanised web.

"I want a web that's open, works internationally, works as well as possible and is not nation-based," Berners-Lee told the audience, which included Martha Lane Fox, Jake Davis (AKA Topiary) and Lily Cole. He suggested one example to the contrary: "What I don't want is a web where the Brazilian government has every social network's data stored on servers on Brazilian soil. That would make it so difficult to set one up."

A government never gives up a power it already has. The control it currently has over the web will not be relinquished.

Because it's better to have *one* standard for DRM than a multitude of proprietary crappy plugin-requiring implementations.

They're essentially defining a DRM plugin interface standard, so we're not better off than before, but worse: a plugin interface that isn't useful for much else than DRM.

And the interest groups already found out that they could use that interface for other media than video, too. Like text.

So at some point, nytimes.com might ship its articles in a format that requires a DRM plugin (* not available on all platforms) to read. We were really lucky that the W3C standardized that, otherwise no-one could read it!